Dan Gillmor: This Mac devotee is moving to Linux

http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/06/20/from_mac_to_linux/index.html

by bensummers • 16 years ago

106 94 16 years ago

SamAtt• 16 years ago

My main problem with this is he's dropping a platform that isn't a walled garden (the Mac) to protest walled gardens. By doing that he's making Apple more likely to abandon the one platform they have that isn't a walled garden in the future

It seems to me the better strategy would be to support the Mac until Apple tries to control Mac software development in the same way they do iOS development and then go to Linux. That way Apple can clearly see that people are rejecting the walled garden philosophy.

astine• 16 years ago

Or perhaps, more to the point he could keep the MacBook but drop the iPhone (assuming he hasn't already.)

However, one good reason he has to move now as opposed to later, is that later might be too late. Moving to a new platform can be costly and difficult and Linux can be trickier than most to pick up. He might want to have more experience with it when the time comes to drop Mac entirely if that's his goal.

old-gregg• 16 years ago

I was actually disappointed to learn that his move was a political one. He started really great with "My strategy is to use what works best, period." That should have been the best reason to switch. It was, in my case: playing with random OSS projects is much easier on Linux because most often it's the #1 target platform for software I'm interested in.

Speaking of "use what works best": I still have the MBP to run Photoshop, precisely for that reason.

jpenney• 16 years ago

"Playing with random OSS projects is much easier on Linux"

I couldn't agree more. I am primarily a .NET/Windows programmer, but I have an Ubuntu VM that I have been using to hack on OSS-based work I've been doing recently. Package managers make it super simple to get everything up and running quickly, and mean I can keep each of my machine's VMs up to date with whatever new thing I'm mucking around with.

donaq• 16 years ago

That should have been the best reason to switch.

I'm pretty sure most early Linux adopters switched from whatever proprietary platform they were using for political reasons (i.e. freedom). I'd argue that without the people who switched for political reasons, Linux would never have acquired its current level of awesomeness.

kwantam2• 16 years ago

He made the specific claim in the article that he believes the cost of switching operating systems escalates with time; if he sees it as inevitable that OSX will go walled, it's reasonable for him to cut his losses now.

I don't necessarily agree with him that OSX will inevitably go walled, but given that belief his behavior is sensible.

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

he believes the cost of switching operating systems escalates with time

Where's the evidence for that?

Desktop OS behavior has been converging for years. Linux gradually gets more and more features that were formerly restricted to proprietary systems (e.g. iPod compatibility). Emulators have gotten better. The hardware has converged: Everything runs on Intel now. The OS has converged: Everything runs with Unix underneath now. The browsers have converged: there's Webkit browsers for Mac, and Webkit browsers for Linux.

What makes it harder to move from Mac to Linux (or vice versa) than it was, say, three years ago, or five years ago?

What I really don't understand is how you can simultaneously argue that Apple isn't going to continue introducing new Mac OS features and that Mac OS is going to get increasingly hard to migrate away from. Stationary targets are easy to hit. It's moving targets that are difficult to track.

0wned• 16 years ago

This reminds me of a Grigori Perelman quote (the guy who turned down the Fields Medal and the Millennium Prize on principal):

"There are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.”

Apple not only "tolerates" walled-gardens, they build them and encourage others to do so. That is enough reason to not use a Mac.

napierzaza2• 16 years ago

This guy sounds like quite the martyr if he is indeed leaving the platform he's been using for more than a decade on political grounds. I think he's either lying to try and stir up a response from Apple or he's that crazy. Linux isn't easy to get into, but going from one platform to any other is going to take a lot of effort.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

>Linux isn't easy to get into

I moved into Linux from a background in Windows. The way I did it was to start by gradually replacing the proprietary Windows applications I was using with FOSS equivalents that had good cross-platform support.

The next step was to install Ubuntu as a dual-boot onto my secondary computer and play around with it. I quickly determined that it was considerably easier to do most of the things I do on computers under Ubuntu than it was under Windows. Going back to my primary OS came to feel more and more like returning to prison after a weekend pass.

When it came time to replace my main PC, I bought a new box with no OS and installed Ubuntu as my primary system. Migrating my data was painless, since it was all stored in open formats by this time (moving my email was particularly nice - I just grabbed my Thunderbird profile and dragged it across to the new computer).

The final test was my wife, who is not that interested in technology and just wants the computer to work. The transition was painless for her, since she could use all the same applications on the new computer that she had been accustomed to using on the old.

krig2• 16 years ago

I'm a Ubuntu user myself, but I found it a bit amusing that he bought a laptop to run Linux, and the laptop can't run Linux.

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

And, slightly older MacBooks always run Ubuntu great :-)

billybob• 16 years ago

Isn't this at least partly the manufacturer's fault? I think Ubuntu is trying to work with PC makers to get drivers written and tested before the hardware ships.

Maybe it's a bit chicken-and-egg to get that to happen - people won't buy Linux boxes until it works on every machine, but makers won't try to get it to work on their machines until people are buying Linux boxes.

I did manage to buy a Linux box from Dell a while back. Even though I immediately wiped their custom install and upgraded to the latest version, set up dual-boot, etc, buying one with Ubuntu pre-installed was the best way I could determine to make sure the hardware would actually be compatible.

krig2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I definitely think it's a chicken-and-egg problem. In general, my experience is that the hardware that has official support in Linux works much better there than in other OS'es.

Things are certainly getting better than they used to be, now I'm more surprised if things like wifi and webcams don't work out of the box, whereas a while ago, it was almost a certainty that they wouldn't.

technomancy• 16 years ago

It's weird; I have one of those Thinkpads, and it works great with Ubuntu.

dotBen2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I've always found Thinkpads to be some of the most compatible machines for running Linux (after Dell business machines, which tend to/used to be spec'd to be available for purchase with an Ubuntu flavor).

I do think Thinkpads have lost some of their *nix roots since the Lenovo split because IBM was traditionally a big supporter of Linux, Lenovo less so.

eitally• 16 years ago

Ditto this, although I did have a few issues when trying to run the 64-bit version. That had more to do with 3rd party driver support than Ubuntu itself, though. I'm completely addicted to the lightning quick boot times of Linux on modern hardware.

TY• 16 years ago

I have a recent Thinkpad X201 (got in May) and it required some tweaking to get any kind of graphics (even for the OS installer itself) to work with Lucid Lynx.

Some features still don't work as well as they do under Windows 7 on the same machine, mostly in power management department:

- Battery life is not as good (4 hours max)

- Fan seems to be on more under Linux

- Screen brightness can't be adjusted

- Fingerprint scanner doesn't work, but I don't need it anyway

Otherwise, the machine is great under Ubuntu:

- It's fast and powerful but very light

- Easily fits into any bag (12 inch screen)

- Quite sturdy construction

- 500GB of hard drive space allows me to run any kind of VMs I need

- Up to 8GB of RAM

- 802.11n networking (works fine with Ubuntu)

- All of this for about $1200 Canadian, including taxes (13%) and shipping - it was under a promotion

dkarl• 16 years ago

There isn't an easy place to find out how well various laptops are supported. Years ago I decided to buy a laptop and did a lot of research to find one that worked well with Linux, and I found many people who claimed to have Linux working well on their laptops. However, when I looked for detailed information and dug into write-ups people did, I found that there were always problems. Suspend and hibernate didn't work right, usually, and various laptops had various other issues as well. Config files had to be changed, firmware had to be patched, kernel patches from obscure places had to be applied, and surprisingly often there was a small kernel patch written by the author himself. I would find these problems in reports of "success" stories, so I just assumed that everyone was struggling, and people who said they had no problems had crazy expertise and were just like the people who said the Linux desktop was totally awesome and fine in 1999.

As the situation of Linux on laptops has improved, however, it's been harder to find installation write-ups, which probably means that people who have no problems simply do not bother posting detailed accounts of the fact that they have no problems! I mean, here's one, but how many people are meticulous enough to write a blog post about the fact that their laptop works, and then add the post to http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ so I can find it?

http://wernerroth.de/index.php/2009/12/18/kubuntu-910-runs-a...

So true success stories are mostly invisible, or at least outwardly look the same as the "success" stories where a guy applied six kernel patches and wrote a shell script that he runs manually whenever he needs to hibernate and claims, "Hey, wow, my laptop works great now, and it was so easy!"

For a person like me, who doesn't want purchasing a laptop to turn into a major educational experience, it would be nice to have some way of knowing whether a specific laptop will work out of the box with major Linux distributions.

freetard• 16 years ago

http://www.system76.com/index.php?cPath=28

Kadin• 16 years ago

I thought that was surprising also. ThinkPads have a good track record of Linux compatibility.

Is it IBM versus Lenovo difference, I wonder? IBM used to be fairly good about using reasonably open or at least industry-standard hardware when they were running the ThinkPad show.

againstyou• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, Ubuntu's latest version, called "Lucid Lynx," won't run properly yet on the X201. Meanwhile, Lucid Lynx is running nicely in a "virtual machine" on my MacBook Pro.

wow! so you already moved ? what are you waiting for ? 10 years to get an OS that at least run on your hardware ?

moxiemk12• 16 years ago

I think he's making a stand at the wrong time. He says that he's leaving the Mac to protest Apple's gradual move towards walled gardens, away from open platforms.

When the Mac ceases to be an open platform, and becomes a walled garden; when something he _actually wants to do_ becomes impossible because of Apple's policies, moving away in protest makes sense. But moving away in protest of something that hasn't happened?

GiraffeNecktie• 16 years ago

Why should he wait until something becomes impossible, rather than less than ideal? Sometimes you just need to see the writing on the wall.

He writes "As noted, I've been happy in the relatively free Mac world. But given the slowing pace of Mac OS development, there's reason to believe Apple is mostly milking Mac OS users. Will it phase out serious PC development? Or will it eventually move its command-and-control methods up the value chain to the Mac? Apple says it's committed to the Mac's future. I'm not so sure, especially after Jobs, speaking at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference earlier this month, made it clear that he believes the iPhone/iPad ecosystem is the real future of personal computing, with PCs becoming a much smaller player."

moxiemk12• 16 years ago

I'd say that "slowing pace of Mac OS development" simply isn't true; if anything, I've felt like there is more development going on now that iOS is creating a large pool of Cocoa/ObjC developers.

And also, it's still not less than ideal. Nothing has changed wrt. MacOS's openness; in fact, Apple continues to promote new APIs that are cross vendor (OpenCL, for example) with new releases of MacOS.

Apple isn't going to one day magically turn off "unapproved" applications with no warning; it will be a gradual process if it ever happens. Indeed, one must see the writing on the wall, but it has to be written first.

metageek2• 16 years ago

If he sticks with Mac, then he's funding the company that he believes is trying to destroy desktop computing.

knowtheory• 16 years ago

Yeah this guy has it backwards. OSX is still a *nix. It's still open, and you can do more or less anything you would need with it.

It's the iOS devices that are locked down. The lock down was one of the major reasons i got a Nexus One instead of an iphone.

Protest Apple where their behavior is bad, not where their behavior is decent.

symesc• 16 years ago

Same: I bought a Nexus One because I was upset with Apple's approach with the iPhone.

My primary concern with Apple and the iOS platform is how they block applications that they view as strategically damaging. The best examples are Google Voice and any ad platform other than iAds for use within apps.

Do I miss the iPhone? I miss the "Apple experience" in some ways, but not enough to move back.

I think Apple is underestimating the power of small but influential communities like this one (followers of Hacker News). The more technologically fluent one is, the more likely you are to move away from the iPhone . . . even though you may have used and loved Apple products for years.

Losing this community will not affect sales numbers directly, but it will affect investment of ideas into the iOS platform over time.

I anticipate more innovation on Android than on iOS until Apple changes their protectionist ways.

cageface2• 16 years ago

If you disagree with a company's policies it's much more effective to boycott them entirely than it is to boycott individual products.

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

Why? If they see their sales decline equally in distinct products under both objectionable and reasonable policies, shouldn't they assume they have a branding problem rather than a policy problem?

Naga• 16 years ago

It is *nix, ish. Everything works, ish. Sometimes there are really isoteric workarounds for certain things, and some things plain just don't work. I've been much happier just switching to Linux than if I had continued to struggle with OS X.

jonhohle• 16 years ago

OS X is a UNIX (http://images.apple.com/macosx/technology/docs/L416017A_UNIX...) Linux, on the other hand, is not. (Though it is UNIX-like.)

ROFISH• 16 years ago

Actually, the iPhone is a UNIX too. Jailbreak it (and install the UNIX utilities) and you have SSH access to it. You can compile and install all sorts of *nixy things on it.

However, the default kernel state is require a codesign for everything.

astrodust• 16 years ago

This strikes me as an especially misguided, misinformed expedition. To start out on your journey by purchasing a notebook that's incompatible is a sure sign you're doing something wrong. Like a man protesting the oil spill in the gulf by abandoning their car only to buy a goat instead of a horse by accident.

Why do people rail against Apple for making the iOS "walled garden" and yet have nothing to say about Sony or Microsoft and their locked down game platforms? At least Apple lets people produce applications and opens up their marketplace to everyday people. Microsoft charges an extraordinary amount of money for their 360 developer kit, XNA being a toy when compared with the real thing. The PS3, likewise, is way beyond the reach of any hobbyist.

Apple charges $99 for the developer kit, cost of Mac notwithstanding, and your application has a very good chance of being accepted. Call the App Store what you will, but it's a very good place to do business.

orangecat2• 16 years ago

Why do people rail against Apple for making the iOS "walled garden" and yet have nothing to say about Sony or Microsoft and their locked down game platforms?

Consoles aren't trying to replace general purpose computers, iOS devices are.

jherdman• 16 years ago

And you don't think that Apple has sent the clear message that they don't see the iPad or iPhone as a general purpose computing device?

I think they've done a pretty great job of indicating that these are appliances and are not to be considered as a smaller Mac. I don't think this is necessarily the right thing to do, but sometimes you need a dictatorship before a democracy. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

dotBen2• 16 years ago

I think you miss the point. iOS is part of the Apple stack, and to Gilmore's point, development of the main OS X platform has been shifted towards iOS. The whole Apple set up assumes you use OS X + iOS + iPods, etc.

Sony have nothing to do with being part of the stack of any operating system, and while Microsoft owns XBOX it too has little-to-no integration with Windows. Your comparison therefore seems irrelevant.

Comparing the Apple App store as a 'better place to do business' than XBox or Sony PlayStation is also strange as the two are completely different in terms of proposition, customer demographic, development resource requirement and potential return on investment.

BenoitEssiambre2• 16 years ago

imho, Ubuntu's user experience (when your computer's hardware is supported out of the box) is now superior than both window's and mac's user experience. Mac's UX is not bad to the extent they have adopted a Gnome like desktop. Where they strayed away from Linux, the UX is usually inferior, for example the very poor Spaces implementation and that bar at the bottom that doesn't have separate icons for the different opened windows of applications. When I'm on a mac, I'm always shuffling around piles of windows with no good way to organize them and change between them. I'm horrified when I have to press those side mouse button that makes it look like someone sneezed out barely recognizable small versions off all my programs on my monitor. It's like the computer equivalent, for finding a document in a pile of throwing the whole pile across the floor and walking around to find what you are looking for.

tvon4• 16 years ago

> Mac's UX is not bad to the extent they have adopted a Gnome like desktop.

To be clear, GNOME adopted an OSX like desktop.

BenoitEssiambre2• 16 years ago

I don't think so. Ideas have flowed both ways, but I've been using Gnome since the 90s and OSX has taken more from Gnome in my opinion than Gnome from OSX.

cageface2• 16 years ago

Agreed. There are some apps I miss on Linux (well, maybe just Ableton Live), but I find the experience superior overall too. Certainly this is partly because I'm a very command-line oriented users and Mac and Windows systems just can't compete in that respect, but I also find the gnome UI more efficient and ergonomic.

Laptops can still be a little dodgy though. Support for common desktop hardware is very very good in modern Linuxes but laptops can still require a bit of tweaking. If you want to run Linux on a laptop you need to either do a bit of homework and make sure you buy something that works well or buy a pre-installed machine with support. If a novice friend asked me for advice on switching I'd probably suggest the latter. Nothing takes the shine off a new machine like having to download and compile drivers by hand.

jsz02• 16 years ago

My pattern for trying out the latest & greatest Linux distros is something like this:

-- Install: Gets better every time. Rarely have issues anymore with the basics of video, networking, sound, etc.

-- First boot: Gets better every time. Things tend to look nicer, fonts are nicer, icons are better, defaults are more reasonable. Installing software is easy.

-- First week of usage: Defeat that all the usual suspects suggested as alternatives to the apps I use on OSX or Windows just haven't made much progress. They're still borderline unusable or no viable alternatives exist. No amount of perceived freedom justifies downgrading my applications, dual booting, emulating, etc. Just not worth it.

ahk• 16 years ago

And the sound system is still a mess.

jokermatt9992• 16 years ago

> Defeat that all the usual suspects suggested as alternatives to the apps I use on OSX or Windows just haven't made much progress. They're still borderline unusable or no viable alternatives exist.

I pretty much only use my home computer for entertainment purposes, so I haven't had these issues really. I will admit that I prefer to run foobar2000 and Firefox through WINE, but I've mostly been satisfied or happier with the Linux alternatives. There clearly is an issue with some professional applications (GIMP vs PS comes to mind); I'm just curious which ones you have in mind.

BrandonM2• 16 years ago

Gimp and vim [1] may be difficult to learn, but invest a little time in them and you won't need anything else [2].

[1] Many would prefer to substitute emacs

[2] This doesn't cover sound or video editing, but there are programs to do that as well.

akkartik• 16 years ago

If an ultraportable came with ubuntu by default I'd dump macos in a heartbeat.

Magneus• 16 years ago

Check out the laptop offerings from System76. They offer two netbooks and a 14" 'ultrathin' model. http://www.system76.com/index.php?cPath=28

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

The reasons given are a bit odd, but it actually makes sense in one respect. If you want to be working with Android phones and tablets because you don't like Apple's direction with iOS, then there's going to be an impedance mismatch between your new devices and Mac OS X.

wmf2• 16 years ago

Compared to what? I would believe that Android phones don't integrate flawlessly with OS X, but do they work any better with Linux or Windows? My impression is that Android only cares about the cloud and it barely acknowledges the existence of PCs, let alone integrate with them.

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

Syncing music (including transcoding). Using your phone as a remote control. These are things that work okay if you live entirely within the Apple ecosystem, once you start straying outside and using FLAC or Vorbis or Android or Rhythmbox you'd be as well leaving completely rather than muddle along half-in and half-out and relying on 3rd party support like Doubletwist.

(Though it's worth noting that the Linux guys are getting really god with iDevice support, but longer term I'd bet on Android working best.)

brisance• 16 years ago

>> It's much lighter than my MacBook Pro, yet has a great set of hardware features that Apple can't seem to provide in its own laptops despite their high prices. (Example: The ThinkPad has a reader for flash-memory cards.)<<

So do the current lineup of Macbook Pros.

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html

napierzaza2• 16 years ago

Oh my. I feel like some people on the internet over-exagerate because they hope the corporation will respond to their cries. So you're getting a linux hand-held? Oh, no you're getting rid of your Mac because you don't like the iPhone policies? I guess that hasn't been tried.

dylanz• 16 years ago

I'm trying to do the same thing with OpenBSD.

A lot of vendor lock in on the ol' MacBook Pro hardware. Broadcom wireless chipset, Nvidia chipset, etc. I've been hacking through my dmesg one by one trying to tackle everything.

Instead of reverse engineering the drivers, like a lot of the community has done (my hats off to you!), I broke down and got a USB wireless stick (rum(4)), and am running on Vesa drivers :) It's not "pretty", but lets me run my WM (xmonad) and everything is still pretty snappy.

It's not something you setup overnight, especially when you've lost your .muttrc and a ton of other crucial dotfiles after spending too much time in OSX land and using their native applications. That's my fault.

Eventually, I'd like to give back to the community, and that's what I'm going to do.

aohtsab• 16 years ago

Does anyone have experience working with WINE? (WINE Is Not an Emulator). Also switching from Mac to Linux (Ubuntu), but have a few applications that require Windows.

vdoma• 16 years ago

http://appdb.winehq.org/ will tell you if your app is supported on Wine. Most of my Windows-only apps work, albeit with some minor glitches...sometimes.

dagw• 16 years ago

Just be aware that just because an app is listed as working in the appdb, doesn't mean you can reasonably expect to type "wine app.exe" on your computer and have it work. All it means is that someone somewhere managed to get it to run once under one particular configuration.

jasonlotito• 16 years ago

People always talk about switching. Switching to Linux is easy. Sticking with Linux is an entirely different situation. I'd be more inclined to enjoy stories like this if it was more about how the person has been using the OS for a few months already.

Edit: This isn't a jab at Linux, either. I just think a "I switched months ago" story is more valuable then "I just switched an hour ago, rebel me!"

seltzered• 16 years ago

I agree with this, after having a linux dual-boot for four years on my last laptop, it got to a point where I didn't even remember the password for it. I've been happy with just using a cygwin shell inside of windows these days.

jakevoytko• 16 years ago

I switched my last computer to Ubuntu 13 months ago, and haven't looked back. I haven't regretted it once! Emacs and Firefox/Chrome work fine, there's finally a reasonable 64-bit version of Flash, Steam works well under WINE, and OpenOffice and GIMP are.. ahem workable.

It hasn't been all sunshine: I installed Kubuntu on a new desktop 3 months ago, and a month later had to do a complete wipe/reinstall to Ubuntu. I couldn't find the incantation to completely switch to Ubuntu using apt-get.

warmfuzzykitten• 16 years ago

I'm sure Dan is replacing his TV and cable hookup with a network-connected computer and HDTV monitor so he won't be forced to watch only the programming the cable network provides (and takes a cut of) but will be free to watch the vast array of entertainment programs available on the net. The fact that there are almost none of these shouldn't sway his decision, because if everyone did the same, surely there would be some, sometime.

I feel the same about this as I do about any economic or technical decision made for religious reasons. You're free to think what you want, but, as Scott Adams says, I'm free to hear what you say on the subject as incoherent babbling.

loewenskind• 16 years ago

>I'm not so sure, especially after Jobs, speaking at the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference earlier this month, made it clear that he believes the iPhone/iPad ecosystem is the real future of personal computing, with PCs becoming a much smaller player.

Well of course! I think the vision Apple sees is computers being for producing and everything else being for consuming [1], so since most of what every computer user does is consuming it stands to reason that consumption devices will make up the majority of computing devices.

Life is hard to live if you're looking for conspiracies under ever rock and assuming that everyone just has the most evil purpose possible.

[1] Actually by "producing" I mean 80% producing and 20% consuming, and with "consuming" I mean the reverse.

Shorel• 16 years ago

I don't see why he can't simply keep using OSX and just not buy an iPod or iPad or iPhone and use Android based devices instead.

Dan Gillmor: This Mac devotee is moving to Linux

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